Long Land War

* Book: THE LONG LAND WAR. The global struggle for occupancy rights. Jo Guldi. Yale University Press..

"on the global history of the long land war—a war over everything from agrarian reform to tenant rights, from India and China to England and Ireland, from the late 19th century through the present—and into the future."

Review

Excerpted from Geraldine van Bueren:

"In The Long Land War Jo Guldi defines occupancy rights as the right not to be displaced, for both urban and rural dwellers. This definition provides her with the creative space to explore, through history, ecology and informatics, the relationship between global poverty, the forced movement of populations and climate change.

Guldi explains that the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), founded in 1945, used land redistribution to protect the entitlements of rural and indigenous communities. Its activities were informed by its staff and consultants, including the economist Doreen Warriner, a Warwickshire farmer’s daughter who had rejected a prestigious American fellowship and travelled to Prague in 1938, where she learnt about the fate of Jewish families who were disappearing. She co-ordinated safe transport for many of them to work on Canadian smallholdings, and was later among those who championed land redistribution as a “peaceful path” or “third way” between capitalism and communism. This approach was deprioritized in the 1980s, however, when the World Bank supplanted the FAO’s role. The bank relied on market forces to address inequities; it also funded large-scale agritech at the expense of traditional farming practices.

The fundamental question is: how can states redistribute land while guaranteeing civil and political rights for everyone? The Chinese Cultural Revolutionary path and the Nazi Lebensraum (“living space”) – “the conceit that a growing German population would require more land, the subjugation of other peoples and the creation of farms in colonized territories” – are extreme examples of approaches that dismissed these concerns. The FAO’s original answer was to conceive of land redistribution as a tool to end global poverty through democratic means, with the participation of indigenous farmers in the shaping of policy. But the World Bank’s financing pressured the FAO towards the newly developed high-yield crops and pesticides of the agronomist Norman Borlaug’s “Green Revolution”, which produced more food globally, but drove smallholders from their lands. In 2018 the UN adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, which was supported by the FAO, with the US and the UK among a small number of countries voting against it.

The declaration incorporates the right of rural dwellers to sustainability, to refuse toxic chemicals and to determine their own food and agricultural systems. It upholds the right of respect for the cultural identity and traditional knowledge of rural people."

More information

Podcast via https://thedigradio.com/podcast/long-land-war-w-jo-guldi/